Chronic diseases are widespread and include numerous inflammatory and non-inflammatory diseases of a wide variety of organs. Chronic diseases often considerably limit the quality of life of the affected patients. Hence it is desirable to provide more rapid and reliable diagnostic methods in order to optimize the treatment and care of patients with chronic diseases.
Certain physiological parameters such as gammaglobulins, blood sugar level, or other blood values are often determined in order to diagnose diseases. However, it is difficult to distinguish between or determine non-inflammatory chronic diseases, inflammatory chronic diseases and/or acute phase reactions. There are still no specific markers for many chronic diseases. For example general inflammatory markers are used in the prior art to diagnose chronic inflammatory diseases. However, a problem with this is that many of these parameters are not only increased or changed in a patient with a chronic inflammation but also in an acute phase reaction such as an infection or injury.
Thus there is a major need for new markers that are suitable for the diagnostic problems in connection with chronic diseases. In particular there is a need for markers which enable a differentiation between non-inflammatory chronic diseases, inflammatory chronic diseases and/or acute phase reactions.